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Monday, June 16, 2008

For Benefitting the Glorious Nation of Hakka-ness

We were having dinner one day with friends and since Asians don't know how to have proper meals, a one-and-a-half hour dinner will inadvertently turn into a big fat joke where people will try to degrade others at the table just for laughs sake. If you haven't noticed, the only time Chinese people can have a proper dinner is when tonnes of food are at the table. And that too, most of us will munch down everything that's provided, go home bloated and gluttoned, having demeaned almost everyone at the table either with racist remarks, untastely jokes, or lame remarks.

That's the Malaysian Chinese Dinner Culture.

So, there was dinner. Tonnes of food on the buffet line, and what do the Chinese do? They take a big chunk of everything, gobble it up in 10 minutes, and sit around trying to talk about the sun, moon stars and the sky.

And we were happily being the barbaric Hakka (Hakka is a rather major Chinese dialect) people that we were, we were talking with our usual vulgarity. Don't get me wrong, we do not mean wrong, but we just somehow manage to sound wrong. Even making a joke would sound like we're angry at something.

So the question about a few terms came up like Ngat Chau. Translated literally it means to chew on grass (not that type of grass!) but the real grass. It was meant to be a racist remark where I come from, and many people don't know this because of our local context. From where I come from, boat people from the neighbouring country would always come into the town and create social problems for us. So we would refer to them in the most degrading term we can find. That's how we are; Barbaric. Not all of us think like that now, but it doesn't mean that our grandparents share the same sentiment. So, yeah... That's what Ngat Chau means. It means that these people are so useless and seen upon with such disgust that we refer to them as something that is no better than something that chews on grass.

And I write this just so that people understand our culture. Not that I agree with the use of the word, but I would like for others to know a bit more about our culture.

Then there is Kiu du Mm Seet, Kai du Mm Diong. That's gonna take my whole life to try and translate and contextualise... Ask Victor about it. I don't wanna get involved in this...